


A Grand Gift For Silence

by obvious_things (free_up_the_cheaper_seats)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: "Harry" Watson is now Hareem Watson but she's still a lesbian, "John" is now Jahan and he is of Afghan origin and also not an army vet, Autism, Fairly Graphic descriptions of suicidal ideation, Friends to Lovers, I will eventually do Reichenbach falls and it will be brutal and I am so sorry, Internalized Homophobia, Lestrade is a Black woman organizer who works with a transformative justice collective, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sherlock also doesn't work with the cops, Sherlock is autistic because this is my house and I said so, Sherlock is trans but that won't come up for a while, Slow Burn, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:49:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25603090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/free_up_the_cheaper_seats/pseuds/obvious_things
Summary: "Jahan could not keep his eyes off of Sherlock the entire time they were at the crime scene. Sherlock darted from person to person in a whirl of black wool, keeping up a constant stream of incomprehensible fragments of speech as he reached out to touch the dead woman’s face with one slender finger before licking his fingertip in plain sight of everyone. Jahan stared openly, unable to force his gaze away. It should have troubled him, this break in his normally habitual self-control, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to care. Sherlock was like a constant spray of fireworks. Part of Jahan was watching to see if he would run out of gunpowder and eventually dwindle; the rest of him was watching Sherlock with idiotic wonder, mouth slightly open as he looked at all the pretty lights."In which John Watson is actually Jahan Watson, a half-Afghan doctor raised in London who worked in a hospital in Afghanistan before it was bombed, and Sherlock Holmes is a trans man with autism who will not work with the police.
Relationships: Harry Watson & John Watson, Mycroft Holmes & Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

It had been over a month since Jahan Watson had arrived back in London, and he couldn’t stop thinking about killing himself. There was no drama to this thinking; it wasn’t as though he conjured up vivid, striking fantasies of pitching himself off of buildings or slitting open some artery in the bathtub. He didn’t even have a bathtub. The flat where he was staying had a single shower stall outfitted in ghastly green tile, a small mint-colored enamel sink, and a mirror with some kind of rust eating at the edges. His suicidality was distinctly uncinematic, silent and corrosive as rot. He thought about killing himself as he pressed coins into the laundry machine. He thought about killing himself as he brushed his teeth. The feeling was neither small or timid but rather utterly impossible for him to articulate in any active way, so he just carried the feeling with him as he went about his business. He wanted to kill himself the way acid-splattered stone wants to crumble or a house’s rotten joists want to collapse. Desire didn’t really come into it. The structural damage had just been severe. It was not the sort of thing that could be withstood, not even for one as patient as he.

His bed here was small, smaller than the barracks where he’d slept so often in the past 7 years, smaller even than his matchbox bed had been in uni all those years ago. There was a small, scratched desk of laminated wood and a modest chest of drawers made of the same stuff. The room was tiny, barely bigger than a pocket square, silent save for the whirring of a ceiling fan. Jahan didn’t care. He thought instead of the bottle of heavy-duty prescription sleeping pills on his windowsill—the length of rope he had purchased on a sudden untameable impulse from the hardware store down the way. The reasons he hadn’t yet killed himself had more to do with morbid curiousity than any real instinct for self-preservation. He wondered how long he could stick around in much the same way as one might wonder at a beheaded cockroach: an idle question of how much more time the poor bugger had before, inevitably, he had to be put out of his misery. Jahan sat upright in his bed, back pressed to one long wall, feet dangling from the side of the bed, and stared at his hands, as though waiting for the flesh to simply fall off.

Because Jahan was not a British war veteran, he did not qualify for any sort of benefits beyond the meager sum disability afforded him. He dragged himself from bed without a fuss and began to get dressed for work. Deciding that he had used up his daily allotment of self-pity by the late, late hour of 8:30 am, he snapped the buttons of his gingham shirt briskly through their buttonholes, pulled on a thick sweater. He was grateful, in a way, for the routine, for the string of small tasks that would carry him through until the evening, so he knotted on his burgundy tie, grabbed his keys, phone, wallet, and cane before walking out the door.

Hareem had been the one to get him a job at the clinic. She had, apparently, at one time or another, slept with four separate women who worked there and was still in touch with three of them. One of them had mentioned a spot opening up after a doctor left the clinic a couple weeks after Jahan had arrived back in London. He had returned after nearly a decade of working as a doctor in Afghanistan, treating local civilians who were injured by indiscriminate military attacks from various global powers, returning to London weeks after a bomb was dropped on the hospital where he had been working. From the incident he received a badly injured shoulder and such extreme PTSD that even the Tube’s rumbling underfoot could still sometimes launch him into a full-fledged panic attack.

For the first few weeks after the bombing, he had been treated in a makeshift hospital before finally breaking down and calling Hareem with the phone she’d sent him on his birthday. The phone was very clearly a hand-me-down, engraved as it was with “Harry” alongside Clara and the date of their wedding. Jahan had liked Clara, appreciated how her gentle honesty smoothed the edges of Hareem’s brash dramatics, but it had been only a few months after the engagement when Hareem had broken her sobriety for the 14th time and walked out on her wife. He’d lost most of his remaining faith in his sister then. He loved Hareem, loved her beyond reason or any need of hope. All the same, when he called her from his hospital bed, the pain on his shoulder an unbearable thing he somehow had to bear, there was a significant part of him that hoped she wouldn’t pick up. It was the first time he was not the one picking up the desperate phone call of a broken sibling. He didn’t care for the feeling. Hated how his voice broke as he whispered, “I want to come back,” hated the stunned silence that meant she wasn’t prepared for this, wasn’t prepared to be the one relied upon. “Please,” he’d choked out and she said only, “Okay.” Within a few days, she had sent him a plane ticket and a week later, he was in her flat, barely able to speak. She took him to the doctor a few days later. The woman he saw was kind, infuriatingly gentle as she told him it would be months of physical therapy before he regained reliable use of his left shoulder. He didn’t ask her how long it would be before his mind could be used reliably as well.

He had started seeing a therapist, which helped a little, but it didn’t change anything, not really. At night, he still heard the terrible screams of children. He saw a boy’s leg blown off, another’s skull crushed beneath a block of stone loosed from the wall. All the horrible things he repressed in his many years of service foamed to the surface after the explosion. All the horrors he had borne witness to clawed behind his eyes, sank sharp teeth into the meat of his brain. What could one session a week with a well-meaning stranger do about that? His therapist was nice enough, a middle-aged Korean man who liked to ask Jahan questions about his panic attacks and his limp while stroking the lapels of his jacket. Jahan didn’t tell his therapist that he was thinking about killing himself. He didn’t want to go to a mental hospital, which he was sure Dr. Park would make him do. He didn’t want to be locked up with a bunch of other crazy people and get asked invasive questions by people he didn’t know all day long. All he wanted was a reason to live—some sign that life would, one day, feel not so utterly impossible to survive.

He couldn’t keep anything down anymore, not memories, not pain, not even the food or water he knew he needed to survive. He thrashed on Hareem’s sofa, and when he woke her for the third time in the middle of the night, he knew he needed to leave. The strained sound of his sister attempting comfort was more than he could take, and so he left, subsisting on disability funds until he could work once more. Now that he had been working for a number of weeks, he was no longer eligible to remain in the subsidized housing unit where he currently lived. They’d given him until the end of the month to find somewhere else to live, but the idea of finding somewhere new seemed to Jahan a task so insurmountable that he had avoided thinking about it entirely in the past few days. As such, the issue gnawed at him from the dusty back corner of his mind, unresolved.

As he walked into the clinic, the receptionist sat up straighter in her seat as she waved a greeting.  
“Good morning, John!” she said cheerfully.  
“Morning, Lucy,” he replied, giving her his warmest smile.  
Since arriving back in London, Jahan had returned to his old habit of telling English people that his name was John. It wasn’t, obviously, and Jahan wasn’t even a name white people had a particularly difficult time pronouncing, but it was so much easier to be John. Easier to have a name so generic people forgot it moments after introduction. Easier to sink into pleasantries and unthreatening charm, to make small talk with patients who rarely had anything actually the matter with them, to flirt mildly with Lucy as she heated her lunch in the microwave and he forsook a meal in favor of another cup of coffee. Easier to do all this than to sink to his knees and begin the public screaming and sobbing that sat threatening as a blade to the throat every moment of every day.

Jahan knew that Hareem thought he had gone back to work too soon.  
“It’s—okay. If you need time. You know that, right?” she asked him haltingly in the days before he began his job. But Jahan didn’t want time. He didn’t want the acrid stretch of empty days in bed. He didn’t want to rest, and he didn’t want to take time to “heal.” It was work he needed. Somewhere to go, people to see, things to do. Every day before sleep and every day as he woke, he felt solitude like the cold barrel of a gun on his tongue. The more time he spent alone, the more he considered crazy shit, like telling Dr. Park that he wanted to kill himself and letting himself be dragged off to a psych ward just so that something might change. But he didn’t want to lose the already feeble control he had over his life: so he went to work. Knotted his tie in the morning and unknotted it at night. Took his pills and called his sister every Sunday at 7pm. And if more nights than not he thought about tying a noose to his ceiling fan and letting the bones of his neck snap as all breath was squeezed from his dying body—well, that was his own goddamn business.

He was walking home through the park when he ran into Mike Stamford. Mike was a solidly built man with tiny round spectacles that seemed as odd as they did charming. He and Jahan had been at uni together and then medical school, working side by side well into the morning on more than tense and miserable night. Mike was as good a friend as any Jahan had ever had.  
“John! John Watson!” Mike called, and though Jahan liked Mike, he felt an irresponsible urge to flee. He turned around to face him instead.  
“Stamford, Mike Stamford. We were at Barts together,” Mike continued, as though Jahan might have forgotten him.  
“Yes, of course, Mike, hello,” he said, going in for the kind of brisk, casual, one-armed hug and pat on the back that Jahan had so consciously practiced in his youth.  
“I heard you were working in Afghanistan or somewhere, being a hero and saving kids from bomb blasts. What happened?”  
“I got caught in a bomb blast,” Jahan said.  
They got coffee.  
“You still at Barts, then?” Jahan asked.  
Mike nodded. “Teaching now. Yeah, bright young things like we used to be. God, I hate them.”  
They both laughed.  
“What about you?” Mike asked. “Just staying in town til you’ve got yourself sorted?”  
Jahan shrugged, trying to look stoic. “It’s not like I’ve got an Army pension to live on. Can’t work enough hours to afford London, really.”  
“And you couldn’t bear to be anywhere else. That’s not the John Watson I know.”  
“Yeah, I’m not the John Watson--” Jahan snapped, voice low, before cutting himself off. There was a long pause.  
“Couldn’t Harry help?”  
Jahan laughed with no humor. “She can barely take care of herself.”  
“I don’t know,” Mike said, persistent in his attempts to assist.”Get a flat share or something?”  
“Come on,” Jahan said, trying to look amused, “Who’d want me as a flatmate?”  
Mike laughed. When Jahan frowned at him by way of question, he said, “D’you know, you’re the second person to say that to me today.”  
“Who was the first?”

Jahan didn’t know what he had expected upon being introduced to Mike’s mysterious acquaintance also in search of a flatmate, but it certainly hadn’t included a tall, angular stranger named Sherlock Holmes asking him what his real name was after Mike had attempted to introduce him as an old friend from medical school.  
“Can I borrow your phone?” Sherlock asked Mike, and Jahan, on instinct, handed over his own.  
“Your name isn’t John?” Mike asked into the silence that followed as Sherlock typed furiously.  
It was all Jahan could do to shake his head. “Jahan.” He turned to Sherlock. “How—”  
A woman came in to give Sherlock a cup of coffee and he said something rude about her lipstick. Sherlock handed back his phone and Jahan barely registered it.  
“How do you feel about the violin?” Sherlock asked, turning back to the microscope he had been examining when Jahan and Mike came into the room.  
“I’m sorry, what?” Jahan said, absolutely bemused.  
Sherlock turned to a laptop and began typing at a rapid clip. “I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end.” He looked up at Jahan. “Would that bother you? Potential flatmates ought to know the worst about each other.”  
“Oh,” Jahan said, as things started to make sense. “You told him about me.”  
“Not a word,” Mike said. The bastard was smiling.  
“Then who said anything about flatmates?”  
“I did,” Sherlock said, sounding bored. “Told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult person to find a flatmate for. Now here he is just after lunch with an old friend, clearly back from Afghanistan. Wasn’t that far of a leap.”  
“How can you possibly know that?” Jahan asked, sounding embarrassingly incredulous even to himself.  
“Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. Together we ought to be able to afford it. We’ll meet there tomorrow evening; seven o’clock. Sorry, must dash. I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary” Sherlock said, apparently ignoring his question.  
“Is that it?” Jahan asked. He was angrier than he wanted to be.  
“Is that what?”  
“We’ve only just met and we’re going to go look at a flat?”  
Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “Problem?”  
“We don’t know a thing about each other,” Jahan said, incredulous. “I don’t even know where we’re meeting.”  
For a moment, Sherlock scrutinized him. Then, he began to speak.  
“I know you’re a doctor just recently back from Afghanistan where you worked for—oh, 7, 8 years?—before returning to London after some sort of violent incident. I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you, but you don’t like to go to him because you don’t approve of him—possibly because he’s an alcoholic, more likely because he walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp’s psychosomatic—quite correctly, I’m afraid.”  
Jahan very deliberately pried his jaw up from the floor. Sherlock looked smug.  
“The address is 221B Baker street.” He clicked his tongue and winked at John before sweeping out the door in a dark grey woolen greatcoat and a burgundy scarf looped perfectly around his long neck. “Afternoon,” he said to Mike, and then he was off.  
“Yeah,” Mike said. “He’s always like that.”

When he got back to his room that night, he got out the length of rope from under his bed and stared at it for a long moment. Absently, he began to wrap it from elbow to palm, looping around the length of his forearm as though gathering a water hose. He stared at the floor counting his own long breaths. Something terrified was knocking about inside of him, like a scared bat caught between his ribs and desperately attempting escape. Perhaps irrationally, the thing that terrified him most was that Sherlock Holmes had known his name wasn’t John. How could he possibly have known? Mike didn’t know, so it wasn’t as though he could have told him. It made him distinctly uneasy, the feeling of being seen. Like he was being x-rayed without his permission. That Sherlock has incorrectly guessed Hareem was his brother gave him some comfort, but a paltry sum, not enough comfort to outweigh everything else the man had seemed to know. How had he known about Afghanistan? The length of time he’d worked there, the “violent incident” that had sent him back, Hareem’s alcoholism, that she had been the one to leave Clara. It was too much knowledge for a stranger to possess, particularly when all Jahan knew in return was a name and the address of a flat in Central London that he liked.  
Coiling the rope carefully and setting it once again underneath his bed, he Googled Sherlock Holmes.

When he turned up at 221B Baker Street the next day, his hopes of receiving some sort of clarity were dashed immediately as Sherlock announced he had already taken it upon himself to move in, and when their landlady asked if they’d be needing two bedrooms, Sherlock did nothing to disabuse her of the notion that the two of them were together.  
“Of course we’ll be needing two bedrooms,” Jahan said, sounding rather more outraged than he had intended. He turned to Sherlock. “You know, I read about you online last night.”  
“Anything interesting?”  
“The Science of Deduction,” Jahan said, referring to the title of Sherlock Holmes’ extremely peculiar blog. Sherlock perked up, looking somewhat pleased.  
“What did you think?”  
“Can you really identify a software engineer by his tie?”  
Sherlock waved a hand at him dismissively. “Just like I can identify your brother’s alcoholism from your mobile phone and your professional career from your face, leg, and shoulder.”  
“How?”  
At that, Sherlock simply smiled at him and turned away. His phone rang and he picked up. “Another one?” he asked, obviously before giving the person on the other end of the line a chance to speak. “Right. Text me the address.” He hung up the phone before letting out a whoop of unholy volume. “A case, Mrs. Hudson, we’ve got a case! A brilliant one, too. Tricky. Very tricky. It’s practically Christmas!” he bellowed before dropping a kiss on her cheek and sweeping out the door.  
“That boy will get himself killed, all that running around. I can tell, you’re more the sitting down type. I’ll make you a cuppa, you rest your leg—“  
“Damn my leg!” Jahan bit with far more vehemence than the poor woman deserved. “Gosh, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hudson. I’d love a cuppa.”  
“It’s alright, dear,” she said, completely unperturbed. “I’ve got a hip.”

The door to the flat flew open. Sherlock back again. “You’re a doctor,” Sherlock said, looking at him closely.  
“Yes.”  
“Any good?”  
Jahan grinned before he could stop himself. “Very good..”  
“Seen a lot of violent deaths?”  
Jahan nodded.  
“Want to see some more?”  
“God, yes,” and he hadn’t meant to say that, it wasn’t an appropriate thing to say and he wasn’t even entirely sure it was true, only a grin had split along Sherlock’s face and Jahan found himself unable to look away. And then Sherlock was whipping back around to go down the stairs again and Jahan, god help him, was following right behind.  
“Sorry, Mrs. Hudson,” he called up the stairs. “We’ll have tea another time.”

In the cab, Jahan had barely sat down before Sherlock said, “You have questions.”  
“Yes. Was that the police?”  
Sherlock scoffed. “I don’t work with the police. No, Lestrade phoned. She’s—a manager of sorts. Handles these things without any police or prisons.”  
“Is that safe?” Jahan asked, concerned.  
“Police and prisons aren’t safe either. What Lestrade manages, a collective of sorts—it does the work that neither I nor the police can do.”  
“Which is?”  
“Prevent crime from replicating itself. I—“ He let out a long breath, and Jahan thought he might even look sad. “I can solve mysteries. I’m very good at that. Puzzles and all that shiny business. Lestrade—she does the messy bits. Justice and harm reduction. All the rest.”  
Jahan had heard about these sort of endeavors, and they always seemed a bit idealistic to him: nice in theory, impossible to actually execute. But Sherlock Holmes did not strike him as an idealistic man, and if Sherlock trusted this system, alternative though it may be, Jahan was surprised to find that he had faith in Sherlock's judgement without hesitation.  
“Alright, then.” He nodded at Sherlock for good measure. “So how did you know, yesterday? All of it.”  
Sherlock smiled like he’d been waiting for this. “I didn’t know, I saw,” he began. “You’re a doctor, Mike said as much when he introduced you. It’s the middle of June, sunny out, and you were wearing a gigantic woolen jumper—which indicates that you either have nerve damage or are used to a warmer climate. A spot where your watch had slipped revealed skin significantly paler than the rest. So warm climate seemed more likely. Shoulder injury and cane suggested injured army doctor, but you don’t carry yourself like a military man. Still, you have the skittish, wary look of someone who’s spent a lot of time around danger. You look South Asian, Jahan’s a South Asian name, plus you strike me as something of a dutiful type. Service in the homeland seemed likely, then, particularly if that homeland is troubled. Shoulder injury that bad suggests violence; given the immaculate condition of your clothes and nails, unlikely to be a result of carelessness on your end, and you wouldn’t look so haunted on account of a car accident or anything so mundane. War zone, then. Could be one of any number of hotbeds in South Asia, but Afghanistan is the most likely. You limp when you walk, but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, suggesting that you simply forget about it. Shoulder injury is real, you grimace and adjust it almost constantly, but limp probably at least partially psychosomatic.”  
“You said I had a therapist.”  
“You have a psychosomatic limp, of course you have a therapist. Then there’s your brother—show me your phone?”  
Jahan handed it over without a word.  
“It’s expensive—music, email, the works, but you’re looking for a flatshare. You wouldn’t waste money on this. It’s a gift, then. Second-hand, scratches all over like it’s been in a pocket with coins and keys. You’d never be so careless with something this nice. Wear around the plugin port suggests shaking hands when going to charge it. Your hands are steady. Previous owner was an alcoholic, then. Then, there’s the engraving. Harry Watson, Love Clara. Date below, probably an anniversary. Expense of the gift says wife, not girlfriend. Your brother’s given you this phone, which indicates the relationship is over. If Clara had been the one to end things, he’d have kept it. People are sentimental. He gave it to you, which means he wants to be rid of it. He left her. He gave the phone to you, which means he wants to stay in touch, but you’re looking for a flatshare, which means you won’t just turn to him. Shows you’ve got problems with him.” He handed Jahan his phone back and turned to stare at the back of the cabbie’s head. “Any other questions?”  
“That—was bloody incredible,” Jahan said slowly. Sherlock’s face, which had until now navigated the smooth water between cocky and impassive, seemed suddenly small, childlike.  
“That’s not what people usually say.”  
“What do they usually say?”  
“Fuck off.”  
He said it so matter-of-fairly that Jahan couldn’t help but laugh, laughing even as they made eye contact and something between them seemed to settle, slotting inevitably into place.  
“Did I get anything wrong?” he asked once they’d stopped laughing, breaking to breathe.  
“Hareem and I’ve never had a particularly smooth relationship. Split up with Clara six months ago, they’re getting a divorce, and it’s now attempt number 12 to get sober.”  
“Spot on, then,” Sherlock said. He appeared to have just enough good sense to not actually smile at Jahan’s disclosure of Hareem’s alcoholism, but it seemed a near thing. “I didn’t expect to be right about everything,” he finished.  
Jahan grinned despite himself, unreasonably pleased to dislocate Sherlock’s self-satisfied expression.  
“Hareem’s my sister,” he said. Then he turned away, paid the cabbie, and exited the cab.  
“ _Fuck_ ,” he heard Sherlock hiss from behind him. “There’s always something.”

Jahan could not keep his eyes off of Sherlock the entire time they were at the crime scene. Sherlock darted from person to person in a whirl of black wool, keeping up a constant stream of incomprehensible fragments of speech as he reached out to touch the dead woman’s face with one slender finger before licking his fingertip in plain sight of everyone. Jahan stared openly, unable to force his gaze away. It should have troubled him, this break in his normally habitual self-control, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to care. Sherlock was like a constant spray of fireworks. Part of Jahan was watching to see if he would run out of gunpowder and eventually dwindle; the rest of him was watching Sherlock with idiotic wonder, mouth slightly open as he looked at all the pretty lights.

When he managed to look away from Sherlock, his eyes flitted to Lestrade, who seemed to be sizing him up.

“You in the military?” she asked, sounding suspicious when he told her, in a rather desperate attempt to break her tense silence, that he was just back from working in Afghanistan.  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock called peevishly from across the room, where he had just finished taking copious samples from nearly every visible section of the dead woman’s body. Personally, Jahan had thought it a rather reasonable question, given his distinctly London accent. “He’s a doctor.”  
“The military’s got doctors,” Lestrade said, crossing her arms.  
“Obviously. But not him,” Sherlock said. “Now shut up.” He steepled his hands in front of his face, closed his eyes, and began to speak. The stream of deductions that followed was one of the most spectacular things Jahan had ever witnessed. If he’d thought Sherlock magnetic before, he was now a veritable lode of iron ore, all metal within a hundred mile radius flinging itself through the air in an attempt--rather understandable, Jahan thought--to get closer. Jahan, shockingly, found himself able to follow most of Sherlock’s deductive steps, even as they grew increasingly esoteric. When he yelled “Pink!” before striding out of the room, however, Jahan had to admit that he’d somewhat lost the plot.

“Bloody fantastic,” he called anyway, following Sherlock. He could have sworn the tips of Sherlock’s ears went faintly pink.

When, later that day, Jahan found himself carried away in a strange car to meet a strange man in a cinematically sinister location, he was troubled by his own marked lack of concern. It was unclear to him whether this blasé attitude to his own life or death was a symptom of his ongoing suicidality or something altogether new, a sign that he had adjusted incredibly quickly to an entirely novel life order. The strange man attempted to bribe him to surveil Sherlock and Jahan as good as laughed in his face. Sherlock, upon hearing this, simply shrugged.

“You should have said yes. We could have split the fee.”

The case whirs on. Jahan, who has long considered himself a careful, deliberate type, is thrust headlong into the moment. He finds himself doing the most ridiculous things, the height of absurdity, really, texting serial killers, taking a gun from Sherlock Holmes, grabbing dinner at a place called Angelo’s before chasing down a homicidal cabbie. At the restaurant--which is quite nice, really, even if the owner is a criminal--they are given menus and a tea light is lit between them.  
“On the house, for you and your date,” the owner says. Angelo, obviously, Jahan thinks in a voice that isn’t his own, and he’s so horrified at the realization that it has been less than a day and Sherlock Holmes is already in his head that he almost doesn’t register that Angelo has called him Sherlock’s date.  
“I’m not his date,” Jahan says automatically, before he can stop himself. Sherlock’s face is entirely without expression, and Jahan doesn’t know what to do with that. After a slightly alarming story of how Sherlock got him off a murder charge, Angelo leaves them to it.  
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Jahan asks Sherlock outright. He justifies this to himself by calling it “straight-forward” rather than “one more addition to the mounting pile of evidence that Sherlock Holmes has an abhorrent effect on his impulse control.”  
“Me?” Sherlock snorts. “Not really my area,” he finishes, and looks studiously down at his menu. Jahan’s stomach does a funny thing that he absolutely refuses to think about.  
“Boyfriend, then?” he asks, because apparently he is now an idiot. “Which is fine, by the way,” he adds dumbly, because if he’s an idiot now he may as well do the thing properly.  
“I know it’s fine,” Sherlock says, raising an eyebrow.  
“So you have got a boyfriend?” Jahan asks.  
“No,” Sherlock says. Jahan’s stomach, once again, does something peculiar. He, once again, ignores it with vigor.  
“Right. Good. Neither do I,” Jahan replies, literally biting down on his bottom lip so he doesn’t continue to ramble inanely. He may be an idiot now, but there are still limits.  
“Jahan,” Sherlock says, and Jahan looks up. “You should know--I consider myself married to my work, and while I’m flattered by your interest, I’m really not--”  
“No, no, God, no,” Jahan says immediately upon hearing the word “interest.” “I’m not--I wasn’t asking.”  
Sherlock raises an eyebrow gently, but says nothing. Jahan is very grateful. _I’m straight_ , he wants to insist, but he thinks silence might be the wisest choice for the foreseeable future. Still, he says it to himself. _I’m straight. I’m straight. I’m straight._ He says it like a prayer. Irresponsibly, he has the thought that heterosexuality surely should not require so much effort, but he cuts himself off. _Straight_ , he thinks more loudly. He shakes himself slightly.

Jahan is not homophobic. His sister is a lesbian, and though she may be something of a fuck-up, he loves her very much. Always, he’d supported her against their family’s homophobia, coming to her defense when no one else would. He had gay friends in university. He has nothing whatsoever against LGBTQ people; he struggles a bit with Pride parades, but that’s just because he finds all loud group events disconcerting. For his entire voting-age life, he has supported measures expanding the civil rights of LGBTQ people. He is not a homophobe. But there is a part of his brain that, when Hareem came out at age 16, made a rather peculiar set of associations. For as long as Jahan can remember, he has been the responsible, dutiful child. Hareem, on the other hand, was always a trouble maker, getting caught in all manner of hot water, fighting endlessly with their mother and reliably insolent to their father. Jahan secretly admired her for this insolence, but when she began to spiral into misadventure and alcohol as a teenager, it was he who received his mother’s laments, who was made stoic by their father’s volatile and violent moods. A year later, she came out, and in the disappointment and rage that followed, Jahan resolved, rather without any conscious decision, that he would never be the cause of such uproar. He was straight; he was dutiful; he caused no trouble. These things became linked in his mind. So if his gaze lingered on men, caught on the cut of their jaw or the thick line of their shoulders--that was nothing he could afford to think too long about. If sex with women had always been a perfunctory, polite affair, that could surely be ascribed to the repression his Afghani mother had so thoroughly inculcated within him, the distance engendered by his white father’s vicious turbulence. He’d flirted with women. He’d taken them on dates; sometimes, he’d even taken them home. And then he had gone to Afghanistan for 7 years, grateful for how the job ensured no one asked questions as to why he was alone. After all, it wasn’t though a barely-funded hospital in a place ravaged by violence provided ample opportunity to meet women. He did his job. He was good at his job. And when he nearly got blown up at his job, he wound up back in London with far greater problems than the relentless task of heterosexuality.

When, hours later, Jahan walks into the room to find the cabbie and Sherlock locked in some kind of battle of the wits, he walks up to the smirking old man and, without so much as a second thought, cracks open his nose with a punch. The man crumples to the ground, and Jahan, without another word, offers Sherlock a hand.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is much about Sherlock Holmes that Jahan doesn’t know. This surprises him, perhaps more than it should. Sherlock is a creature so utterly himself that any capacity for secrecy baffles Jahan. So, when, an entire month after they move in together, Sherlock tells Jahan that he, Sherlock, has autism, Jahan feels both shocked and idiotic. He wants to lock himself in the bathroom for a few minutes, just to think, but that, he knows, would be a very inconsiderate response, so he just smiles, smiles and nods, says, “okay.”  
> They are having an insane conversation when Sherlock tells him this. Sherlock has put mercury in a shepherd’s pie to see if someone—Jahan—can detect it before he’s poisoned, and Jahan, who is, contrary to popular belief, not a complete idiot, sees it beading on top of the crust.  
> “Are you fucking crazy?” he yells before he can stop himself. “What is wrong with you?”  
> “I have autism,” Sherlock says, sounding bored as he belts his floral silk robe. Later, Jahan thinks that the ferocity with which he reverts to pleasantness might be its own sign of insanity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for relatively graphic suicidal ideation
> 
> also, I talk about autism in this chapter, and I would just like to state for the record that I myself have autism and any slightly offensive thing that Jahan thinks does not reflect my own views

Jahan is going to kill Sherlock.  
He has been living at 221B Baker Street for a little over two weeks when he wakes up to make himself tea and finds boiled eyeballs in the tea kettle. It is 7 in the morning. This is not the first time in his time with Sherlock Holmes that something of this nature has happened. On Monday, he found a group of what looked suspiciously like human metatarsals in the butter dish, and last Saturday there had been some sort of congealed blood in the milk carton.  
Up to this point, Jahan has said very little about all this to Sherlock because Jahan is a polite, respectable man who does not want to yell at his new flatmate so soon after meeting him. Besides, Sherlock is an eccentric, scientific sort, conducting all sorts of bizarre experiments that are probably necessary to the preservation of some poor soul’s life. Considering everything, Jahan is adept at taking things in stride, and all this was likely for a noble cause, so take it in stride he had, going down to the shop for a new pat of butter which he’d kept in its foil wrapper, buying a new carton of milk on which he’d written “MILK ONLY PLEASE” in permanent marker. Eyeballs in the tea kettle before he’s even had a chance to shower, however, is too much, even for him.  
“For fuck’s sake,” he mutters to himself. “Sherlock!” he calls, trying to keep his volume loud enough to reach through their flat but not so loud it disturbs Mrs. Hudson downstairs.  
There is no reply. Jahan, just barely on the safe side of incensed, goes to find him. It isn’t difficult, as the flat isn’t large—Sherlock is sitting cross-legged on his bed, eyes closed, hands steepled in front of his face.  
“Sherlock!” Jahan says again, at the same volume as before. Sherlock does not respond. “Hello? Anybody home?” Still no response. “Sherlock,” he says, calm, smiling, the very picture of pleasantness. “If you don’t say anything in the next 30 seconds, I will get a bucket of ice-cold water and I will pour it over your head.”  
For a moment, Sherlock remains silent, and Jahan steels himself to make good on his promise.  
“I do not think,” Sherlock says, barely opening his eyes and quirking an eyebrow, “that you are in possession of the height necessary to pour anything on my head.”  
Jahan glares at him, though he longs to laugh.  
“I’m very resourceful.” He crosses his arms. “Now. Can you tell me why there are eyeballs in the tea kettle at half six in the morning?”  
Sherlock shrugs. “Experiment.”  
Jahan shakes his head in disbelief. “What possible experiment could require eyeballs in the kettle?”  
“I’m quite sure I could not explain it to your satisfaction, but rest assured that it was completely necessary.”  
Frustrated, Jahan scrubs a hand over his tired face. “Could you, I don’t know, get a separate kettle for experiments?”  
Sherlock makes a noncommittal noise. “Not sure I could be bothered to tell them apart. Besides, I never know what equipment I’ll require, and we can hardly keep track of two of everything.”  
Though loathe to admit it, Jahan feels the man has a point. After all, it isn’t as though the both of them would be meant to manage every duplicate: it is very clear such a task would fall to Jahan and Jahan alone. It’s a quick cost-benefit calculation in his head—how much does he really mind this small excess of care, one of many small excesses of care living with Sherlock Holmes requires? He, who is so expert at minding exactly as much as is convenient. Jahan huffs a resigned breath. It is not so steep a price. 

As Jahan had informed no one of his suicidality, there is no one to whom he can report its dramatic improvement since moving in with Sherlock. It isn’t so much that Sherlock has “cured” him, whatever such a thing might mean. It’s less dramatic than that. When he wakes, even in the middle of the night, even after a nightmare so violent he swears he can taste his own blood, he can hear the sounds of Sherlock down below, pacing, playing violin. Life, now, is too unpredictable to settle into static. Novelty and adrenaline slash through his days. Fewer mornings require that he bully himself into the world of the living—such a world is thrust upon him, hurling knives into the wall, stinking up the kitchen. If Jahan’s desire to die—while not gone— no longer gnaws on him, bored and vicious? Well. He will take it.  
Jahan still works at the clinic, and he is headed there today, tying neatly the knot of his tie in the clean glass of his mirror. He fastens it securely, as though the knot, in possession of the requisite tightness, will rid him of having found eyeballs in the kettle. Ridiculous, he thinks. He is being ridiculous. He is lucky, extraordinarily lucky, extravagantly so. It surprises him to wake up in the morning. All those months ago, lying on a hospital bed, friendless in the country where he had worked for 7 years, feeling so alone he periodically clapped—the only time in his life he’d let himself look crazy—just to make sure he was really there: Jahan had not expected to last a month. The continued fact of him does not make sense. Surely, he should have succumbed by now—bled out, choked on a bullet, his liver thickened with medication so it could no longer serve his body the way a body demands. But still. Here he is. Knot tied. Irritated by his roommate. Ridiculous. A decade ago he could not have imagined that irritation would feel like such a luxury. 

Sherlock shows up at the clinic 13 minutes before Jahan’s lunch hour begins.  
“What is it?” Jahan asks. He tries not to sound too excited; after all, if Sherlock is here, someone has likely died. He is not allowed to be excited at the possibility of someone’s demise—probably a violent death, too, if Sherlock’s on the case. There are limits, he thinks. I still have limits. He looks at Sherlock, who is grinning obscenely. Without his own permission, Jahan grins back. 

The case fascinates Jahan. Admittedly, his fascination is a tame creature compared to Sherlock’s, but he is fascinated just the same. Spray-painted Mandarin. The dead man: murder, not suicide. Symbols, a smuggling ring, no clue what it all means, how the pieces connect.  
There is a man here who knows Sherlock. Sebastian. His hair is slicked back with half a vat of gel. Jahan hates him, hates him so much more than he can explain. When Sebastian speaks to Sherlock—details of the case that Jahan misses entirely—he drags his fingertips along Sherlock’s shoulder. Jahan wants to break his nose. He can’t even tell if Sherlock minds the touch; he thinks he sees Sherlock’s shoulders pull up a notch, tensed, but he could be imagining it. What, after all, does Jahan know. What the fuck does he know. Fascination curdles in his stomach.  
Sherlock, however, does not seem similarly afflicted. He’s flying around the room, pressing his nose to various surfaces, muttering, even reaching out a slip of tongue to taste the pink spray paint.  
“Jahan!” Sherlock says, whirling around. Sebastian’s eyes narrow and Jahan—valiantly—does not smile.  
“Yes?”  
“What do you know about cats?”

Things, as ever, get stranger from there. Jahan finds himself surprisingly used to this, though he has been living with Sherlock Holmes for only a month. For three days, Sherlock drags him around London. There is a very talented graffiti artist, a museum exhibit, a series of curiously maimed porcelain cats, and an A-Z guide. There are odd insinuations from Sherlock about Jahan dating a doctor named Sarah from the clinic (Jahan nearly laughs), and there is blissfully little to be seen of Sebastian Wilkes. Then, Jahan is kidnapped, and things get even stranger.  
He is at the theater, watching Henry IV part 2. There are few leads, and Sherlock does not want his help following up on them, so he hands Jahan tickets, looking bored, and Jahan takes a rare night off. The play is one of his favorites. He doesn’t know how Sherlock knew this. It’s possible Sherlock didn’t know, that this is a lucky coincidence, but he already knows to disbelieve coincidence where Sherlock Holmes is concerned. It is, in his estimation, one of Shakespeare’s saddest plays, though Jahan has yet to find anyone who shares this opinion. Only intermission, and already he feels gutted, delicately so, his insides carved out with the most beautiful spoon. The crown descends on Hal. Joy—Falstaff, Poins, youth, love—edges away.  
He is about to enter the bathroom when a woman taps on his shoulder and asks him to watch her purse.  
“Of course,” he says, because he is an idiot.  
He turns to take the bag from her and then, a sharp pain in his forehead, his vision crumbling to black. 

The people who have taken him think he is Sherlock Holmes. Jahan would love to disabuse them of this notion, except that they will not believe him.  
The torture is almost exquisite. Jahan always admires competence and finds himself admiring it even now, the care with which pain is extracted from him. It’s like music from a violin. Better to admire it than return to his body. Even his stoicism could not bear him up now without this well-practiced retreat from reality, his body a distant thing. 

When Sherlock comes, Jahan wants to weep. Sherlock looks terrible. The right lapel of his jacket is crooked; a single curl hangs out of place. Untying Jahan’s hands, Sherlock’s skin slides over his own, and Jahan does not think about it. To consider it would be an indulgence. He has not earned indulgence yet. 

“How—“  
“Did I find you?” Sherlock interrupts. They are walking home. Jahan did not want a taxi, thought it might make him claustrophobic, and Sherlock did not protest.  
Jahan nods. “Yeah.”  
“Trivial, really.”  
“Tell me,” Jahan says, refusing Sherlock’s coolness, because he still echoes with pain and he wants to know how, for the first time in his life, someone knew to rescue him.  
Sherlock turns to look at Jahan. His profile in the streetlight is devastating.  
“The book. London A to Z. It was a code.”  
“You cracked it,” Jahan says. It’s not meant as praise; just appraisal of fact. If Jahan hears the reverence in his own voice, he ignores it. It has been a long day. Occasionally, even he can be excused.  
“I cracked it,” Sherlock says, sounding pleased. A fond smile sits on Jahan’s face without permission. He has not the heart to pry it away. 

There is much about Sherlock Holmes that Jahan doesn’t know. This surprises him, perhaps more than it should. Sherlock is a creature so utterly himself that any capacity for secrecy baffles Jahan. So, when, an entire month after they move in together, Sherlock tells Jahan that he, Sherlock, has autism, Jahan feels both shocked and idiotic. He wants to lock himself in the bathroom for a few minutes, just to think, but that, he knows, would be a very inconsiderate response, so he just smiles, smiles and nods, says, “okay.”  
They are having an insane conversation when Sherlock tells him this. Sherlock has put mercury in a shepherd’s pie to see if someone—Jahan—can detect it before he’s poisoned, and Jahan, who is, contrary to popular belief, not a complete idiot, sees it beading on top of the crust.  
“Are you fucking crazy?” he yells before he can stop himself. “What is wrong with you?”  
“I have autism,” Sherlock says, sounding bored as he belts his floral silk robe. Later, Jahan thinks that the ferocity with which he reverts to pleasantness might be its own sign of insanity.  
It shouldn’t be such a surprise, Jahan thinks. He knows that Sherlock doesn’t work like the rest of the world. He knows this. But diagnosis seems so tiny compared to the gigantic man he lives with, the giant, giant man who takes up nearly every inch of his life. Autism. What does the word even mean?  
He tries googling it. Sherlock snorts when he sees the search results open on Jahan’s laptop, but Jahan doesn’t know what else to do.  
Google isn’t very helpful. There are vague descriptions of symptoms, which are usually only relevant to small children. There is some useful information—difficulty with social interaction, repetitive movements, intense interest in a limited number of things, sensory hypersensitivity—but he doesn’t know what he’s meant to do with it. For the most part, these are things he already knows about Sherlock. The gigantic pair of noise-cancelling headphones he’ll spend whole days wearing so he can think, the odd arm-flicking gesture that he is so partial to. How he knows 243 types of tobacco ash but deleted the planets from memory. The size of Sherlock’s eccentricity seems too much for a diagnosis to hold. Jahan worries that this thought is offensive. Surely, every autistic person is too big for their diagnosis. Surely, a diagnosis is not meant to contain anyone. But he looks at Sherlock, cross-legged on the kitchen countertop, humming Bach as he pours a mixture of mercury and lemon juice into a bowl of copper sulfate crystals, and he thinks that Sherlock is the biggest, most uncontainable person alive. 

A few months since moving in with Sherlock, Jahan’s life is unrecognizable. Regularly, he runs towards people with guns, flooded with adrenaline, he breaks into houses and places of work to obtain evidence, records, clues, he thrusts himself into absurd situations with scarcely a second thought. Now, there are moments--usually on the phone with Hareem or his mother--when he wonders what the hell he is doing. This is not a life he can explain to anyone. It is a remarkable life, unusual, strange. Before Sherlock, Jahan had spent his whole life trying not to be remarkable, unusual, or strange. In Afghanistan, it was true, he became accustomed to danger and made a habit of moving towards bloodied bodies and screams. But then, there was always the excuse of duty. It was his job, it was what he was good at, it was what he was there to do. The work was unerringly grim, always something to be borne. There had been no pleasure in it, no dangerous spark of delight before he rugby-tackled a man twice his size and brought him to his knees. There had been no cab drive home where he looked at a beautiful man until both their faces split into laughter. It scares him, this life he has. It scares Jahan to know its loss would devastate him utterly.

The case they are working now involves a string of murdered men--sex workers--all working out of the same gay club. Sherlock wants to go to the club tonight; he seems already to know who the killer is, and Lestrade asks them to lead the man to a specific location if they find him. The prospect terrifies Jahan. It does not terrify him for the logical reason that they will be chasing a serial killer. It’s the prospect of goint to the gay club with Sherlock that makes his palms sweat, but to say no seems a bigger risk than acquiescing. He doesn’t want Sherlock to think he’s a homophobe. He doesn’t want Sherlock to think anything is wrong  
Sherlock does not pretend to be straight. Jahan doesn’t want to succumb to stereotypes, but the assemblage of signals is hard to miss--the single earring in his right ear, the relatively consistent use of eyeliner, his propensity for florals, the particular expressiveness of his wrists.  
Years ago, he’d been talking to Hareem about a girl in his class at medical school.  
“She’s nice,” he’d said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I think… you’d like her.”  
Hareem’s eyebrows reached spectacular heights. “Is this your way of saying she’s a lesbian?”  
Jahan grew flustered. “I mean--I don’t-- I don’t know, I didn’t want to assume--”  
“But you think she’s a lesbian?”  
He winced slightly. “Is that offensive?”  
“Depends. Why do you think she’s a lesbian?”  
“Because,” he said, flailing a hand about. “It’s stereotypes, mostly. She has short hair. Wears men’s clothing.”  
“You know,” Hareem said. “Those are things she does on purpose. She’s probably well aware it’ll make people think she’s a lesbian.”  
“So…” Jahan broke off, unsure. “It’s not offensive?”  
“I don’t know, man. Maybe. But sometimes stereotypes are just signals.”  
Jahan isn’t sure how much of Sherlock’s affect is meant as signal and how much is just him doing whatever he wants. Perhaps those two things are not so easily distinguished. 

That night, when Sherlock steps out of the bathroom, having gotten ready for the club, Jahan thinks he is going to have a heart attack. He’s wearing a short-sleeve shirt of purple floral lace and black mesh, the first three buttons unbuttoned. Jahan thinks he sees a line of scar tissue on his chest, but he might just be grasping at straws, trying to turn his eyes into doctor’s eyes. Sherlock is wearing skinny black jeans and a single red chandelier earring, and Jahan looks away because he must.  
He himself is wearing a simple white t-shirt, a little too small on him now (being charged also with the feeding of Sherlock, he finds himself more regularly fed), an old but clean pair of dark jeans, and a black leather jacket Hareem gave him for his birthday nearly a decade ago. When, moments earlier, he examined himself in his bedroom mirror, he had thought he looked presentable. Now, faced with Sherlock, he feels impossibly drab.  
“Well,” Sherlock says, clearing his throat loudly. “Shall we?”  
The club is loud, too loud for Jahan, who feels like an old man when faced with the music and its inchoate pulsing. Can’t these kids turn it down, he thinks, reaching up to cover his ears.  
This is not the first time Jahan has been to a gay club. In fact, it is the third: he went once in college, and another time for Hareem’s 24th birthday with her friends. It is, however, the first time in a decade, and Jahan is overwhelmed. Yes, by the sounds, but more so the people. How close together they stand, how openly, how freely they touch. Two women make out against the back wall. Just a few bodies away, one man works his hand into the tight back pocket of another. Jahan looks around, nervous, as though scanning for the displeased supervisor that will surely materialize at any second.  
“Relax,” Sherlock says, leaning close, so close, to whisper in his ear. “You stick out like a tree in wheat.”  
Is that something people say? Jahan thinks but does not say. It is a thing that Sherlock has said. What do “people” have to do with it?  
The details of why they are here—and what specifically they are meant to be sussing out—elude Jahan. He looks at Sherlock to see him in the crowd, dancing. He moves to the music like water rippling from a stone. Each movement is fluid, perfectly proportioned to the stimulus, and Jahan feels betrayed by the ease of Sherlock’s body amidst these strangers. He looks comfortable—more than comfortable, if Jahan is honest—and Jahan has nothing to do with it. Jahan curls his fingers into a fist, uncurls them once more. He wants a goddamn drink.  
He gets a soda, and he does not continue staring at Sherlock like an idiotic goldfish. The carbonation slides down his tongue, and he wishes for a drink that burns, one strong enough to take him—ever so slightly—away from himself. But they are here on a case, and Jahan has already been irresponsible, losing sight of Sherlock. It is not difficult to find him again. The man is offensively tall, and his floral lace shirt on the dark of his skin, the glint of red earring against neck, they strike Jahan like a palm to the solar plexus. And then Sherlock turns to him, limbs loose as river water, smile unbearably earnest, and the palm pressing against Jahan’s solar plexus is a knife and Jahan wonders that there is not blood everywhere.

Given the knife in his torso, Jahan thinks the noise he makes when Sherlock pulls him into the crowd is perfectly understandable. It is, nonetheless, utterly embarrassing. As such, when Sherlock pulls Jahan closer to dance, it is with superhuman effort that Jahan manages this time to remain silent. For a beat, they are simply moving together, unaccountably close. Then, Sherlock begins to whisper about the case, and Jahan realizes that this—the dancing—is a ploy. No. Ploy is too ungenerous a word. It implies a sort of malice. This is simply a strategic move. It is for strategic purposes that Sherlock leans in so close that his earring drags briefly over the skin of Jahan’s mouth. The fingers digging into his waist are necessary for their disguise. Jahan does not allow his eyes to close. 

Predictably, their evening ends with the two of them sprinting through the streets of London. The suspect—a tall skinny blonde man wearing a neon orange mesh tank—is just ahead of them, and then Jahan is just behind Sherlock as he runs the blonde right into Lestrade’s well-laid trap. Then, they are hailing a cab and Jahan looks at Sherlock and is momentarily terrified, terrified by this brilliant man publicly wearing a shirt of profoundly immodest floral lace in the city night. Sherlock is, Jahan thinks, far more brave than he is wise. And he, Jahan? He is both coward and fool.  
They make it back to the apartment without incident. Sherlock seems still shot through with adrenaline, words leaving his mouth faster than thoughts can form in Jahan’s mind, but Jahan feels tired, wan. His fear has returned him to his own tiny self. Sherlock goes into his room to change, emerging in soft flannel pajama bottoms and his blue silk dressing gown, which is embroidered with tiger lilies. Jahan rubs his eyes and says, good night, pads up the stairs.  
As he lies awake, he hears Sherlock play the violin from below. The sound is like a needle, impossibly sharp, placed carefully in the center of his forehead. He feels so small, compared even to the echoes of Sherlock wafting up the stairs. The days of this life are numbered, he thinks, remembering how Sherlock looked in the club, how he moved. He feels so utterly replaceable. He claps his hands together once, softly, just to confirm that they still make a sound.


End file.
